How do i get the default gateway in LINUX given the destination?

Question

Good day!

I'm trying to get the default gateway, using the destination 0.0.0.0

i used this command: netstat -rn | grep 0.0.0.0

and it returns this list:

Destination - Gateway      - Genmask         - Flags - MSS - Window - irtt - Iface
10.9.9.17   - 0.0.0.0      - 255.255.255.255 - UH    - 0     0        0    - tun0
133.88.0.0  - 0.0.0.0      - 255.255.0.0     - U     - 0     0        0    - eth0
0.0.0.0     - 133.88.31.70 - 0.0.0.0         - UG    - 0     0        0    - eth0

My goal here is to ping the default gateway using destination 0.0.0.0; thus, that is "133.88.31.70"; but this one returns a list because of using 'grep'.

Question is: How do i get the default gateway only? I will need it for my bash script to identify if net connection is up or not.

Any answers will be much appreciated. =)

Answer 1

DEFAULT_ROUTE=$(ip route show default | awk '/default/ {print $3})'
ping -c 1 $DEFAULT_ROUTE

Should do what you want.

Answer 2

ip route show default should do the trick for the default gateway, or you can use ip route get <someip> to see what the route for a particular IP address is.